Menachos 65-71 -- Issue #126
21-27 Tamuz 5756 / 8-14 July 1996

The Temple Made in Heaven

Chadash - new grain - was forbidden to be eaten before
the Omer Meal Offering was made in the Temple on the sixteenth
day of the Month of Iyar. This was usually done no later than
midday so even those who lived far from Jerusalem could assume
by that hour that the Omer had been offered and it was
safe to eat from the new grain.

In post-Temple times daybreak of the sixteenth day marks the time
that new grain is permitted by the Torah. The Torah teaches that
when the Omer cannot be offered the ban on Chadash
is in effect only until the beginning of the sixteenth. But Rabbi
Yochanan ben Zakai instituted a decree to prohibit Chadash
the entire sixteenth day. His reasoning: We look forward to
the Temple soon being rebuilt and the Omer being offered.
If we permit eating Chadash this year from the beginning
of the day, people will say that they can eat Chadash next
year from daybreak as well, when in truth they must wait for the
Omer to first be offered.

In Mesechta Rosh Hashanah (30a) this point is expanded
upon. If the Temple will be built on the sixteenth no problem
will exist, for daybreak already made Chadash permissible.
If it will be built before the sixteenth then the Omer
will have been offered by noon. Why then was the decree for banning
Chadash all day long? The answer is that Rabbi Yochanan
was afraid lest the Temple be rebuilt just before sunset of the
fifteenth (the first day of Pesach) or the night of the sixteenth,
which would not allow enough time to reap the barley and process
it into flour before the end of the sixteenth.

Rashi, however, raises the question as to how the Temple could
be built on a holiday or at night when we know from MesechtaShavuos (15b) that these are times when such construction
may not take place? His answer is that only a Temple built by
human effort has this restriction. The Temple of the future,
however, will descend from Heaven.

Menachos 68b

Plowed in the Cloud

If barley descended from the clouds it could be used for the Omer
Meal Offering on Pesach because the Torah does not specify that
it must be brought from EretzYisrael. But if wheat
thus came down from Heaven a question arises as to whether it
could be used for the Two Loaves offered on Shavuos.

Does the Torah's directive to use wheat which comes "from
your dwelling place" only exclude lands outside of
EretzYisrael, but not the clouds - or does this
exclusion extend to clouds as well?

This question remains unresolved, but there is an interesting
discussion in the commentaries as to how the grain came down from
the clouds.

Rashi explains that the clouds over the ocean swallowed a ship
filled with grain which later came down from those clouds along
with the rain.

Tosefos challenges this explanation. If the source of the grain
was EretzYisrael why should it become disqualified
by being absorbed into the clouds? And if the source was a field
outside of EretzYisrael what reason is there to
assume it might be eligible simply because it entered the clouds?

His own explanation is that the grain in question never grew on
earth and came from the clouds in miraculous fashion, just as
we find (Sanhedrin 59b) that Rabbi Shimon ben Chalafta's
prayer for meat to feed the hungry lions that roared at him was
answered by two large slabs of meat descending from Heaven.

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